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He def looks better than the manga ver tho. But i'd thought he looked darker

IMO I didn't like the manga art, it was pretty shoddy to me. Came off feeling very generic.

I'd accuse the anime's art of being, well, unsuited to the show. The working! character designs aren't bad, but do I want them in SAO? No, no I don't. Was it really that hard to use the original character designs? Those weren't bad.

On a side note, Accel World is looking amazing. I really hope A-1 can match to the quality sunrise is bringing out, since SAO is my favorite between the 2 works.

accel world indeed look sick, but A-! has a good track, and doeas some good adaptations, the thing im afraid is that aniplex(wich is likely the one producing it) its the most propense to do original ends of incomplete works.

Sure about that?
ANN says the chara designer for SAO is Shingo Adachi (who also did the animation chara design for Working) while the animation chara design for HoTD was done by Masayoshi Tanaka .

totoum was right. The only similarity the two character designers do, is everytime there's involved in some adaptations, while they make the characters more faithful to the original source in terms of design or something, they butcher a bit (they make the characters a bit childish compared to the original source, not because of their personalities, but because of their eyeshapes and faces). For exemple (it's a comparison and makes yourselves the differences, since I'm a big fan of anime character designs) :

Spoiler for Novel pic:

Spoiler for Anime pic:

Last time I checked the latest novel illustrations, the character design gets Adachi-fied a bit.

Spoiler for One of latest novel pics:

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I will protect you from the darkness and I change my destiny.MyAnimeList

I'm just curious how the Working!! style is going to translate to the monsters. I can't picture how the level bosses could be done in a way that doesn't come off as either silly or completely at odds with the human players.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is about the character designs -- and I mean that for both the original ones AND the anime ones. Both MCs look somewhat childish in both versions to me, however, neither version looks bad to me. All of the art looks aesthetically pleasing to my eyes. Actually... exclusively in terms of how old they look, I'd say the anime designs are somewhat more flattering in that respect than the novel art. *Shrugs*